


and the New Urth shall be called Ushas

by Bobsled_Hostage



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Crockertier, F/F, Grimbark, Grimdark, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 10:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9120580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobsled_Hostage/pseuds/Bobsled_Hostage
Summary: After their manumission at the hands of Her Imperious Rebellion, the Annihilation Squad retires to what's left of their home planet.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oriflamme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/gifts).
  * Inspired by [surf where white bones twist](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7621027) by [oriflamme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme). 



_Don’t hurt anyone and don’t let anyone hurt you_

Her Imperious Rebellion had phrased it (and you’re paraphrasing a bit) like a friendly suggestion, but you chose to interpret it as an order.  One last command from the Sovereign of the Glorious Alternian Empire.  You suppose you’ll never truly be free from it, even now that you’re ‘retired’.

You suppose it will have to do.

 

* * *

 

 

A clutch of carpenter drones buzz around the site of your new hive, dipping into the water to drive pylons deep into the seabed, building scaffolding upward toward the surface.  It’s bizarre, having your preferences taken into account.  Having something that’s yours.  Jade is excited.  She draws spires and balustrades, enormous bay windows and cozy bedrooms.  Jane watches silently.  Makes tiny adjustments to the plans with minute jabs of her index finger.  You try and remember if you ever had a head for architecture.  What sorts of things you liked when you were a person.

 

It’s hard.  You wake up every morning and the whole day stretches out ahead of you, a blank slate like the surface of the sea or the hard vacuum of space.  No demands from the Furthest Ring, no Empress shrieking in your ears.  Nothing to kill or break.  The first week you all spend on the couch, or in bed, or in piles, or otherwise wrapped around each other.  None of you will say it out loud, but you’re all half-expecting Her Imperious Rebellion to come back and take you away from one another.  To put you back in the jars again until you need to be unleashed on the next thing she needs atomized.  Better to touch and to hold and be held now, to whisper secrets while you have the chance.

Jane bakes.  It’s one of the few functions any of you were programmed with besides violence, and she’s good at it.  Not just troll food either, but human cuisine, dredged up from ancient archives of drowned earth’s culinary knowledge.  Some of it is so sweet that, after four centuries of pickled scorpions and salted forest titan, you can’t stomach more than a nibble at a time.  One night she makes pumpkin cake and Jade cries, for no reason she or any of you can understand.

You discover that, if left to her own devices, Jade will sleep all day.  Jane will go the full 24 days without sleeping at all, unless someone prompts her otherwise.  You take it upon yourself to keep them both to a proper 24 hour cycle - that’s what’s appropriate for this world, you dimly recall.  Someone has to do it, anyway.

They return the favor, on nights when your dreams carry your mind beneath the sea, when your lungs fill with water unbidden and your thoughts turn to the dark between the stars, pulses of psychic energy that would drive weaker minds mad emanating through the whole hive.  Always, the two of them are drawn like magnets to your room, to brave the inky black cloud that sublimes off you in waves and pull you back to the world.  Hold you between them until your eldritch gibbering becomes ordinary screams, which become sobs and then whimpers.  Such visions as the Noble Circle shows you should hold no terror for the Emissary.  The horrorterrors may be losing interest in you. 

You don’t know if that’s good or bad.  If it will make you human again or if it will just be another part of you that leaves.

 

When the _Condescension_ is far enough out that you don’t think it’s returning for you (and you can’t be sure, you can never be sure), you go exploring.  Safe inside the air bubbles Jade holds open, you sink to the bottom of the clear, blue sea in excursions born out of boredom and curiosity.  The sunken streets and skyscrapers of your lost homeworld evoke distant memories, aching in the back of your brain like a phantom limb as the three of you walk the algae covered macadam, slipping into barnacle encrusted buildings to sift for sunken relics of your childhood home planet.  The centuries have not been kind, but here and there are a few trinkets, scattered by the tides or crusted with verdigris, that feel oddly familiar.  The occasional bone fragment pokes through the marine silt, leftover from a skeleton ground to dust a century ago in the swift ocean currents.

Jade teleports in to your room one morning, waking you up.  A rarity, but she’s got a reason to be excited.  Once you and Jane are dressed, she grabs your hands and, in a flash of green light you’re outside, somewhere.

“Look!”

She points at a round, white sphere, skewered atop a spire emerging from the ocean.  If it’s sticking out of the water, the entire structure must be enormous, easily-

“It’s my hive!”

She claps excitedly and, in another flash of green, you’re inside.  Light streams through a curved hatch in the dome of the ceiling, illuminating a room full of junk.  Rusted, smashed monitors, mouldy paintings and scraps of fabric that used to be clothes, tumbled down heaps of metal that might have once been armor.  Growing over everything: rough, green vines, ripe with enormous orange gourds.

“This is- I remember, I used to…”

Jade sinks to her knees in front of one of the fruits, almost as large as her.  Stammers something that you have trouble understanding.  Leans forward and puts her arms around it.  You don’t know whether you should encourage this or not.  Is it part of the healing process, or are you just picking at scabs and re-opening old wounds?  After a moment, Jade smiles up at the two of you.

“Maybe… Maybe when we’re done here, we can find your hives.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

Jane stares for a moment.  She shakes her head, once.

You don’t ask why

 

You find your own hive.  Later, by yourself.  Without Jade’s bubble to keep you dry, you rely on the changes lovingly bestowed upon you by the Noble Circle to keep you breathing underwater.  You have a vivid image from your childhood, vivid enough that you’re sure it’s real, not one of the false ones you’ve picked up along the way: staring out your respiteblock window into the forest which surrounded you on all sides, rolling out as far as the eye could see.  The woods are now vast, vertical reefs, the wood long subsumed into the towering coral ecologies which grew on it.  To the South, there’s a dropoff into deeper, darker water.  You remember there being a waterfall there, once.

You don’t go inside.

 

* * *

 

 

A messenger from the troll settlement arrives one night.  A pudgy, frightened little rustblood, alone in a small motorboat.  Obviously the most expendable way of getting across whatever they dared send you. 

It isn’t until she reaches the little dock at the base of the hive that the realization hits you:  You don’t have to kill this person.  You were told _not_ to kill this person.  Not her specifically, but she belongs to the category _anyone_.  The smallest thing you were ever ordered to spare was a strategically valuable city.  Never a single person.  Never just one gutterblood, bones fragile enough to snap without even trying, eyes you could pop right out of their sockets if you-

She finally works up the globes to ring the doorbell, after only four or five false starts.  Looks ready to bolt, although you know she knows there’s nowhere she could ever run or hide.  You lick your lips and open the door.

Her voice, drenched with badly suppressed terror, is the first you’ve heard besides Jade’s since you got here.  She makes every obseqiance she possibly can without actually knowing your proper name or titles.  Stutters into a grovelling apology for bothering you in person, except that nobody knew how to contact you otherwise (a deliberate decision on your part, but you don’t tell her that) and there’s something they need your help with, and please just kill her and not the whole colony for asking.

You slip flawlessly into your hostess function, ushering her inside with honeyed words calculated to take the edge of raw animal fear off her - as best you can, anyway.  Jade watches from a safe distance, wide eyed, as you lead your guest gently to the livingblock.  You have a guest in your hive.  You own a piece of property and you just now invited someone inside it for the purpose of making them feel welcome.  You laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing.  Jade’s ears twitch and you take her hand.  Run a thumb over her knuckles, a reminder that you’re not in danger and don’t need to defend yourself.  If your guest (you stifle another giggle) is scandalized at the overtly pale display, she doesn’t show it, possibly aware that it might be what’s standing between her and being splattered across three or four spatial dimensions courtesy of The Rampager.  Jane steps in to wordlessly signal that the evening meal is ready.  The Sentinel looks mutely at the visitor, who is now visibly resisting the urge to frantically chew her hands with anxiety.  Perhaps it might have been better to deal with her outside.

You clear your throat.

“Would you care for something to eat?”

 

Judging by the way she attacks her bowl of eel chowder, Hyksos Hesiod does indeed care for something to eat.  Jade was the one to actually bother asking her name, some flawless host you are.  You gather from your dinner conversation, after a bit of prodding, that she was a stenographer or file clerk or some other variety of replaceable cube jockey aboard the ship that once carried you and your companions.  Someone insignificant enough, you think, that nobody objected to her absence when she joined the rest of the trolls who didn’t feel like accompanying the Empress to Gliese 667 for yet another endless campaign.  You’re surprised any of them stayed on Earth at all.  Anyone with any sense would know that the only way off the _Battleship Condescension_ was death, and that an offer to end their term of service early meant exactly that.  And yet, here they all are.  Here _you_ are.

Said settlement of foolish yet somehow still living trolls - mostly warmer hues like your guest, you learn - has run into trouble.  Trouble dangerous enough that they’ve dared come to you rather than trying to deal with it themselves, or perishing quietly like good soldiers of the Empire.  It wasn’t until the _Condescension_ was well away that the denizens of the deep took an interest in the newly built island of steel and carbon, home as it was to so many fleshy bodies and supple minds.  There have been attacks, trolls seized by an unknown force, stepping off the platform to sink beneath the waves.  Things rising up out of the dark waters.  You should have figured something like this would happen, sooner or later.  Hyksos asks you, please, and she understands if it’s not possible or if you can’t be bothered, and maybe there’s something else they can do about it, and again she’s very very sorry for asking-

“We’ll handle it.”

 

It rises out of the water to meet you.  You show no fear, for you feel none.  This being may tower above the crude weapons the colonists bear, and it may kill them, or drag them beneath the waves as its thralls, as its ilk are wont to do.  But each of you have destroyed far worse in your time.  And you’re facing it together.  You raise a hand to it, fold your fingers in greeting.

“This world is under our protection.  Return the ones you have taken and never trouble them or their kind again.”

It speaks in your mind, in the grinding of its mighty chelicerae and the flickering of the bioluminescent stalks and fronds which dot its carapace, its membranes.

**“THIS WORLD WAS TO BE OURS.  TO SPAWN.  TO DREAM.  SUCH WAS OUR BARGAIN, EMISSARY”**

“I’m sorry, it seems I wasn’t clear.  I’m not asking your opinion, I’m issuing a set of demands for you to agree to immediately.”

**"AND IF WE DO NOT?"**

“Then we will kill you.”

**“YOU WOULD DARE TO-”**

“Yes, I would.”

It sits there, half submerged bulk swaying to and fro with the gentle fluttering of its many cilia.  It lurches.  Jade’s ears fold back against her head, sparking green with nervous energy.  Jane clutches her trident impassively.

**“...WE ACCEPT”**

“Splendid.  And, if every single person you took is not returned, or their remains… Well, we know where you live.”

**“YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR IMPERTINENCE”**

“Oh, will I?”

It lurches again.

**“YOUR SUFFERING SHALL BE LIMITLESS, WE-”**

“Jade?”

The Rampager annihilates the leviathan in a green burst of hot ambiplasma.  The ocean beneath it boils, momentarily superheated enough to liberate oxygen from hydrogen.  Jade teleports the three of you away moments before the steam flash-cooks you.

Rescuing the thralls was a pipe dream anyway.

 

The trolls of the colony understand.  They’re ecstatic to hear of the creature’s demise, and had already written off their friends and quadrants stolen beneath the waves as lost.  They timidly ask if there’s any way they can repay you, and you gently but firmly rebuff them.  Back in your hive, you turn over what you said to the beast in your head.  You’ve destroyed more planets in your time than you can remember.  You’ve never protected anything beyond the Empress and the two people curled up on the couch with you.  The first is dead (long live the Empress), the second you made up your mind long ago you’d die defending.  You don’t know that you’re ready to be a protector of worlds.

So, for now, you concentrate on getting through the day.  There’s plenty to fill up your time now.  You’ve got news from the front to follow.  As much as you hope Her Imperious Rebellion and her cadre of friends and advisors will carry the day, the rest of the empire isn’t prepared to just roll over and see things her way.  And something might be wrong with Jane’s biomods.  She hasn’t done anything to indicate she’s in distress, but you know the signs. She’s always felt like the weak link in the group and it would be just like her to hide it.  Then there’s that blinking green message in your inbox that you still can’t bring yourself to reply to.

Jade’s dozing against your shoulder, ears twitching the way they do when she’s dreaming about something pleasant.  Jane is leaning toward you at that angle which means she wants to be held.  You lift your arm and allow her to scoot up to your side.  That accomplished, with her solid and warm and breathing very, very softly against you, you tug the comforter up off the back of the couch and over all three of you.  The fireplace - there are no trees to be found on this world, but there it is - blazes a lovely orange, bathing the room in heat.

 

You decide you must have liked fireplaces, once.

**Author's Note:**

> Might have taken a few liberties here and there with the source material


End file.
